Thoughts of many writers and thinkers on the subject of guns, and the easy availability of guns in America.
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To arm ourselves is the most extreme form of separation I can imagine. To move through life without weapons is another way to remain open to the world, and at its mercy.
I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I’ll even ‘hari-kari’ if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun!
There’s no evidence that I’m aware of that guns protect liberty.
There’s no evidence that I’m aware of that guns reduce crime.
Both Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had guns on them, which is part of their Second Amendment right. It is a part of a culture that is largely protected by special-interest groups like the N.R.A., but the right to bear arms, it seems, only exists for white people.
The Constitution has become a convenient tool and talking point for politicians that get paid by the NRA. The same goes for Americans who just love their guns, so suddenly they’re Constitutional scholars who care about what our founding fathers allegedly wanted.
As a general point, the United States has an extreme budget commitment to prisons, guns, warplanes, armored vehicles, detention facilities, courts, jails, drones, and patrols – to law and order, meted out discriminately.
If you can’t protect yourself with talk, you won’t be alive to protect yourself with guns.
I screamed but he couldn’t hear me over the blast of the gun or the explosions that followed. I wish I had never touched the damn thing. Guns cause more problems than they’re worth.
After every massacre in a school, Americans grasp at quick cures. ‘Let’s install metal detectors and give guns to teachers’ Let’s crack down on troublemakers, weeding out kids who fit the profile of a gunman. Let’s buy bulletproof whiteboards for the students to scurry behind, or train kids to throw erasers or cans of soup at an attacker.’
When it’s easier to buy a cache of assault weapons than cast a vote — expect massacres to be the norm
Why should guns be treated different than toasters? If your defective product injures somebody, you’re responsible for it.
America is a country founded on guns. It’s in our DNA. It’s very strange but I feel better having a gun. I really do. I don’t feel safe, I don’t feel the house is completely safe, if I don’t have one hidden somewhere. That’s my thinking, right or wrong.
America Is A Gun
England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.
Brazil is football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona’s hand.
Germany, an oompah band.
America is a gun.
Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.
Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
Oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun.
What does it tell you that applications for guns since the shooting are up 41 percent in Colorado, and that our cameras found about 50 people in line at one gun shop yesterday outside Denver?
All kinds of celebrities, political ones as well, are increasingly being targeted. In this country, with all the countless guns.
The NRA has become financially dependent on more and more guns being sold – especially the expensive ones. In turn, the NRA has stated that its top legislative priority is to protect gun makers by advocating for legislation that benefits them.
When I was growing up, it was ‘Communists’. Now it’s ‘Terrorists’. So you always have to have somebody to fight and be afraid of, so the war machine can build more bombs, guns, and bullets and everything.
How can we speak to each other like equals when one of us is holding a gun?
I’ve had times where one of my roommates was moving out of the house in college, and because we were the only black people in that neighborhood, the cops got called, and we had guns drawn on us. Came in the house, without knocking, guns drawn on my teammates and roommates. So I have experienced this.
There are many controversial topics out there – abortion, nuclear weapons, the 2nd Amendment, guns, whatever, the war in Iraq. You’re going to be on one side, somebody’s going to be on the other side. Invite those people to the table. Sit down and talk.
If I could uninvent anything, I would uninvent Hitler’s mum, guns and broccoli.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
My belief is that guns are too easy to get in America. My belief is that the NRA has bought much of our congress, to the point that guns are actually the only unregulated consumer product in America. Think about that. It’s stunning.
Yes, people pull the trigger – but guns are the instrument of death. Gun control is necessary, and delay means more death and horror.
I would like to live long enough to see the day when people talk about which guns are the safest.
We lose eight children and teenagers to gun violence every day. If a mysterious virus suddenly started killing eight of our children every day, America would mobilize teams of doctors and public health officials. We would move heaven and earth until we found a way to protect our children. But not with gun violence.
It doesn’t matter how the gun fell into the wrong hands. It only matters that it did.
Teachers do not need to be armed with guns to protect their classes; they need to be armed with a solid education in order to teach their classes.
In Florida, to buy a gun, you do not need a permit, you do not need a gun license, and once you buy it, you do not need to register it. You do not need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun. You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.
Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?
It’s very dramatic when two people come together to work something out. It’s easy to take a gun and annihilate your opposition, but what is really exciting to me is to see people with differing views come together and finally respect each other.
We protect aspirin bottles in this country better than we protect guns from accidents by children.
It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.
You don’t spread democracy with a barrel of a gun.
They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.
When guns boom, the arts die.
America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
My accident happened in what should have been one of the safest places to be: in a police station, at the hands of trained police officers. So more guns are not the answer.
I grew up with a single mother, and I wasn’t out shooting too many guns.
There’s no reason that there shouldn’t be universal background checks to ensure guns don’t get in the hands of people who should not have those guns.
We have to go to war against the people who enable the gun violence, the people who stop us from keeping guns out of the hands of mentally unstable people, of felons, and that means the NRA leadership.
To me guns meant indiscriminate power, the risk of fatally misjudging someone else’s worth.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among the guns below.
It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.
If there is any state that typifies prototypical ‘Murica’ where the trucks and the guns are big and the social safety net is oh so small, it’s Texas.
My father died many years ago now – of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.
An eccentric feature of the new gun laws is that people entering the state capitol can skip the long lines of tourists waiting to pass through metal detectors if they show the guards a license-to-carry permit. In other words, the people most likely to bring weapons into the building aren’t scanned at all. Many of the people who breeze through are lawmakers or staffers who actually do tote concealed weapons into the offices and onto the floor of the legislature. But some lobbyists and reporters have also obtained gun licenses just to skirt the lines.
I’m one of those people.
With more than a million Texans licensed to carry handguns, the state is actually far behind Florida, with 1.7 million. “I’m EMBARRASSED,” Governor Greg Abbott tweeted in 2015; “Texas #2 in nation for new gun purchases, behind CALIFORNIA. Let’s pick up the pace Texans. @NRA”
Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm there wasn’t a big boom sound.
Violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.
… the fact that a police officer on TV said what used to be a fist fight or road rage is now a shooting, and what used to be a domestic dispute is now a gun rampage, and what used to be a tardy or disruptive student is now a school shooter, the fact that the police aren’t much better themselves, the fact that what used to be an arrest or a warning is now a split-second execution …
The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.
Any idiot can kill his enemy with a gun; the hardest is to kill your enemy with love! Love kills her enemy by making the enemy her friend!
Every one of my positions cuts – out half the country. I’m pro-choice, I’m pro-gay rights, I’m pro-immigration, I’m against guns, I believe in Darwin.
If you are a gun manufacturer, the product you make is not subject to safety regulation by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Toy guns are subject to safety regulation; water pistols are, but not real guns.
Should we have background checks, waiting periods? To drive a car you have to pass a test that shows you know how to drive your car safely, you should have to do the same thing with guns.
I think the NRA, they got it half-right when they say, ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.’ I change it to, ‘Guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people.’
Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys.
Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention with the possible exceptions of handguns and Tequila.
There is more hooey spread about the Second Amendment. It says quite clearly that guns are for those who form part of a well-regulated militia, i.e., the armed forces including the National Guard. The reasons for keeping them away from everyone else get clearer by the day.
Fourteen-year-old boys are not part of a well-regulated militia. Members of wacky religious cults are not part of a well-regulated militia. Permitting unregulated citizens to have guns is destroying the security of this free state.
In truth, there is no rational argument for guns in this society. This is no longer a frontier nation in which people hunt their own food. It is a crowded, overwhelmingly urban country in which letting people have access to guns is a continuing disaster.
We do not need guns and bombs to bring peace, we need love and compassion.
Adolescence, that swampy zone between safety and power, is best patrolled by adults armed with sense and mercy, not guns and a badge.
Guns are part of the American psyche, aren’t they? This is collateral damage for having a Wild West mentality. It’s intrinsic to the American psyche. It’s never going to change.
Guns don’t kill people. Gun owners kill people.
Obviously a president can’t rule as a king and ban all guns. But I think we need a president who is going to make sure that there is gun control and that people still feel like their freedoms are intact.
When the first settlers arrived in America nobody knew who was White and who was wrong. No Natives had ever seen a firearm before, or had a clue who could be the good guy with the gun.
Our love affair with guns has nothing to do with tyranny, or militias, or self-preservation. Just ask any NRA member the following: If Jesus Christ himself were to come down off the cross and grant you one wish, would you opt for a world without guns — or the one we live in now? If every gun owner truly feared for their life and liberty, the answer would be obvious. But it’s not about life and liberty. It’s all about the sheer hard-on of owning a gun.
Why do we still cling to the intellectually retarded notion that liberty can be obtained, maintained, or lost at the end of a gun barrel? When you’re working 3 minimum wage jobs to make the minimum payment on a pair of socks you bought 12 years ago because your credit card company slapped you with an interest rate that would make a loan shark holler WTF! … well, no one needs to hold a gun to your head. Your ass has already been sold down the river.
Representative Willis has introduced a bill, modeled after a Chicago law, to hold gun stores accountable for flooding our streets with weapons. Thousands of guns recovered by the Chicago Police Department can be traced back to just a handful of stores.
There is a recognition that Second Amendment rights, like First Amendment and other rights, come with responsibilities and limitations. There is no reason both sides of the gun debate can’t support policies that both protect the right to legally own guns for sport and safety, and reduce the likelihood of mass fatalities.
Something is wrong here, and it’s more than easy access to guns or violence on TV. It’s about lack of love and attachment to loving people early in life.
I never liked guns, I hate them, I always blink before they go off.
Of course I do not regret the Bond days, I regret that sadly heroes in general are depicted with guns in their hands, and to tell the truth I have always hated guns and what they represent.
We’re going to see fugitives and felons, eventually, being able to get guns much more easily.
In Canadian comedy, you’ll almost never see guns. If you bring a gun into a scene, it’s like, ‘Whoa! Wow, how are we going to deal with that!’ Guns in an American comedy are a given. Violence in America is used in a much more cavalier way.
In Houston everyone owns guns and uses ’em – sometimes just for the hell of it.
Speaking personally, you can have my gun, but you’ll take my book when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of the binding.
Semi-automatics have only two purposes. One is so owners can take them to the shooting range once in awhile, yell yeehaw, and get all horny at the rapid fire and the burning vapor spurting from the end of the barrel. Their other use – their only other use – is to kill people.
Yes, guns are to men what jewelry is to women!
Guns are the tools of the poorly educated.
The poorly educated air their grievances with guns, the smart use science, discovery and the global internet.
Guns are the problem and more guns are not the solution.
I’m concerned about how accessible guns are.
America is drowning in guns. Even if they were all banned from midnight tonight, it would probably take a century or two to get them all out of circulation and maybe not even then.
We live in a world of guns, bombs and terror. To conquer hate seems a nigh-impossible task.
Our surest protection against assault from abroad has been not all our guards, gates and guns, or even our two oceans, but our essential goodness as a people. Our richest asset has been not our material wealth but our values.
Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It’s truly unbelievable.
We cannot remove guns once they are made. We can still stop making bullets.
I would like to see every single soldier on every single side, just take off your helmet, unbuckle your kit, lay down your rifle, and set down at the side of some shady lane, and say, nope, I ain’t a gonna kill nobody. Plenty of rich folks wants to fight. Give them the guns.
When I speak out against the guns or against the big corporations, some of my friends say, ‘Oh Yoko, be careful. These people have all the power.’ But, you know, most people don’t speak out because they are frightened.
